The FrontierShipping Collection
by Zero Slash One
Summary: Dumping grounds for whatever FrontierShipping stories I decide to write.


**Firstly, I would like to apologize for removing the first iteration of this collection: The reason it was done, was because the segments were frankly Old Shames, to borrow a Trope term. I mean, the first chapter alone featured a pointless and Narmy lemon.**

**The few stories I did make will be preserved, just to see if they're salvageable. Personally, I doubt that they are but you never know how things're gonna turn out before they happen.**

**Alright, I'm back. And I brought with me a new kind of weird.**

* * *

><p>In a place that resembles a well-furnished and spacious high-end apartment <em>(metaphorically speaking; such residences exist only in 3D spacetime, and no 21st century human architect has managed to come up with even the idea of a 4D spacetime apartment, outside of weird Sci-Fi, and 10D is wholly undreamt of) <em>is virtually everything that can be expected to be within such locales.

The kitchen is nothing if not roomy and well-supplied, and the seventeen-year-old Crystal is absently making herself a sandwich. This is a truth, loosely, mutually conflicting and valid as most truths are.

Two floors above in their bedroom, Gold and Silver and Crystal are pressed against eachother and holding on for dear life. The twenty-year-olds are embracing love and lust in equal measure, hurtling uncontrollably and unstoppably towards their shared climax and utterly lost in the heat of the moment. This is a truth, loosely, mutually conflicting and valid as most truths are.

Outside on the beach, Red and Gold are having a double-battle with Blue and Silver; the red-head doesn't feel the interest but he cannot deny Blue anything.

Back inside the house, within a room best described as a gray-slated void, a different sort of battle is taking place, not between Pokemon but between two naked humans, using everything that the Five-Dimensional Conceptual entities have at their disposal.

The blond boy sits in a meditative position, his face unexpressive, but Crystal doesn't miss him shift state, onto those of his millionfold alternate selves who learns the science and becomes an accomplished Alchemist, but not on the level of FullMetal.

The floor crackles with the azure Alchemical lightning of a transmutation and it comes alive, moving up to encapsulate Crystal in a dome. She doesn't hesitate to unleash Pride's shadowy mass. The umbral tendrils creeps from underneath her red shirt and slice the construction into countless chunks.

They fall to the ground, shimmering fleetingly with their left-over transmutive energy, and the second they land, Emerald unleashes his second assault, a flurry of spears forming and flying at her, only to scrape against Greed's Ultimate Shield and fall again.

In silence, they ponder their next moves. Around them, physical space deforms as their makeshift battle-field converts to 5-D space. In the split-second that Emerald is disoriented, she lets rip a barrage of icicles directly at him.

In the brief moment before space realigns itself to the tenets of 5D geometry, a chaotic disorderly void reigns supreme and undisturbed, devoid of any brand of logic. It is through this non-space that the icicles hurtle, and one of them slice open Crystal's gastrointestinal tract and pours its contents free. Another splinters against the deep-red armor-skin of her eyes. Around them, the remaining icicles drift in geosynchronous orbit and does a little dance and makes a little love and gets down tonight.

Crystal grimaces, and feels the initiation of the fact of Time Lord chrono-biology termed 'Regeneration', and her body erupts into golden light and flame, and her material manifestation collapses onto another state of quantum superposition as does her consciousness, and a different expression of Crystal replaces her.

She glances down briefly with her mind's eye: Her ampler chest and the Ouroboros on her sternum and the sudden appearance of the runes on her arms makes it abundantly clear to her that the current iteration of herself has somehow replaced Lust of the Homunculi.

"I love you," she speaks abrubtly after twenty or so minutes of silence. Her voice is not one voice but many, and many of the voice-layers conveys different intents and extents of that sentiment.

Without warning, their small corner of 'the world' snaps back into 3D reality and with that, the field of their fight changes again. Alchemical lightning crackles, and in defiance of both Alchemical principles and earthly physics, matter is created from nothing.

The sparks dance and shimmer, and the chessboard gradually constructs itself, tan wood and white spots and black spots and pillars at each edge of the four spots. The crackling noise rips through the air all the while but neither reacts in any way to it.

Instead, they consciously bring about a shift of their own quantum superposition states: She remains in the body of Lust, and he remains in his original body but with Alchemical skill, but their minds ceases being truly separate.

In short order they agree on the specifics of this chess-match - starting player: Crystal - starting layer: Five - number of dimensions in which to play: Five; height/width/depth/forwards and backwards in time/sideways in time - and begin the game itself. They rule out moving sideways in time, because Time-Active chess is complicated enough to keep track of without alternate gamestates muddling it. As it was, it is a continually self-revisioning line, singular, of a game.

In essence, it's a Time War encapsulated as a chess game. The distinction is academic.

Crystal reaches out with her mind several turns in the future and moves her Queen away from an otherwise-inescapable trap of Knights onto the present playing field, at G5-8. She learns then what he does in the future - assemble a veritable fleet of Knights - and resolves to counter-act it before it even forms.

Emerald counters easily with a Pawn to capture the royal piece. Both know that it is the move he was going to make. Both know that it was the move she wanted him to make. Both know that it was the best move to make under those circumstances.

She moves again, a Rook moved from further in the future to put his King in check. Such is the nature of 5D chess: Pieces jump back and forth in time, and endless volleys can be launched even without deviating from the opening set-up. Winning the game, then, is all but impossible.

She doesn't care, and neither does Emerald, who simply disposes of her Rook by mentally moving a Knight from the future trap for her three Queen(s) and captures her Rook.

Crystal scowls and Lust's eyes gleam malevolent red. She is perfectly aware of how stuck the situation is about to become: If she takes his Knight, he'll respond in kind, and they'd be locked in a possibly endless back-and-forth as they fought over a single space out of over five-hundred. If she doesn't, he'll have assembled the first piece in his 'Fleet of Knights' and the tactical high-ground.

She does, and like that, the war begins. The battle of D4-1 happens over and over and over ad nauseam, but the exact course of events doesn't matter because it is less a series of events and more a single metaphor. They're all conceptual beings here, so that isn't surprising.

Bottom line: No one wins because neither of them can. So, D4-1 is abandoned, left with a single pawn to denote it as a lost cause, and they move on to other spaces on the boards.

The next 'assault' is launched by Emerald using the pieces that he already has on the board. In a 3D game, that might seem... of consequence but in a 5D game, it is simply one manner of offensive play.

His 'Fleet of Knights' or 'Codename: Singularity-Trap' is assembled quickly on the core eight spaces because she allows it and because she knows that she could end it in a second whenever she wants. Several turns later, she does, and in the past, one of her Pawn begins to make its way towards the future site of Emerald's formation.

Emerald responds to her assault on the past of the game by capturing her Queen in the present. In this particular conflict between past and present, the past barely manages to assert its dominance, like a horny mutt that has its mate backed into a corner, and the shape of the boards changes again from the alteration of history, as it will again.

What it results in is Crystal having eight Queen-pieces from past and future stationed in one present at the corners of the boards, prepared to strike at anything in their lines of sight, an unguarded King, and nothing else.

What it leaves Emerald with is a King, surrounded by twenty-six Pawns in an unbreakable formation, and three Knights flitting about. Twenty or so turns _are _a long time, they know, but neither can for the life of them work out how exactly the 'new timeline' of their match resulted in these set-ups; neither bothers to.

The rest of the game board is wide-open and free of the Pawn-marked 'dead matches', as if the revision of game-board has wiped them away too. It makes no difference whether those remain or not; earlier and later, they'll cease to exist again.

The game continues apace: Both of them employ many openings and gambits that aren't possible in 2D or 3D Chess, and several that are. Emerald's next moves takes place over several minutes, not in the sense that they chronologically take minutes, but in the sense that they transpire over the few minutes they're made and after they're made.

It fails completely, swept aside like a passing breeze by a simple move of one of her Queens. They continue onward, each executing a series of moves as coordinated and graceful as a seasoned dance artist's performance.

The specifics don't matter: From their perspective, everything - space and time, matter and energy, sooner and later, chess moves and human lives - is blurry at the edges, too much for them to tell the whole messy thing apart, and subdivide it into neat little sections for convenience.

She continues to make the moves, and somehow, they remind her in their own ways of their multitudes of possible lives.

The move of a Pawn a board up, and something like a summary, a bare-bones minimum, forms in her mind: They are the victims of a sudden vampire attack. Time passes, for both living and dead. Within the millennium, they've become perpetual companions _(not always friends, not always lovers, but always 'companions')_ on an aimless and endless tour of the galaxy.

Queen captures Pawn: They are traveling with the Doctor, a number of incarnations after his thirteenth, and they experience many adventures. It comes to an end as the tenures of all companions do when the death and bloodshed claims them. Their 'consolation prize' is that they live long enough to witness the birth of the Dalek Predator, that ushers in a new age of safety and peace for the universe.

Knight captures Queen: In a dimension that barely qualifies as real, somewhere between their universe and the FullMetal Alchemist universe, the twenty-seven-year-old Crystal tries to perform Human Transmutation to revive her dead brother. To no-one's surprise, it Rebounds and costs her both arms. The thought does occur to her but she isn't the FullMetal Alchemist, and so she never applies for the State Alchemist program. Instead, she lives out her life in Rush Valley, with frequent visits to Winry Rockbell for maintenance of her Automail.

Bishop captures Knight: In a dimension tangential to that one, they are the Homunculi Lust and Envy who abandoned Father's ambitions alongside Greed, but they flee to the distant country of Xing where Wrath and Pride can't locate them. From a small village, they observe Father's plans from the outside, hearing and seeing Hohenheim's counter-machinations in the vaguest of details. The thought of aiding either side does strike them, but to hell with Father and to hell with Hohenheim: They have their own lives to live and they are decidedly _not _going to expend energies of their Stones on unproductive speculation.

Pawn captures Bishop: Memories of a possible future play in her mind, and by extension his as well. After the end of the world _(well, one of them, the one they don't prevent or overturn) _has occurred, they're simply alone on Earth, wandering a dead world with plenty of food and drink for them to indulge to their heart's content. Ten years of unrestrained avarice proves sufficient before they commit joint suicide; what other options are there?

Rook captures Pawn: Memories of a possible past play in her mind, and by extension his as well. After a failed coup d'etat, they're appointed the leaders of the criminal syndicate, Team Rocket, which is more power and responsibility than they deserve and/or desire. The exact chain of events is somewhat hazy, but within five years, they rule the continent and the death-tolls (daily, not total) number in the dozens; it even becomes a game of sorts, seeing who can find the most original way to kill someone.

Queen captures Rook: They are a pair of cards in the Deck of a nameless _(not technically 'nameless' but her name keeps on changing as the timelines change) _Duelist, a contemporary of the pro-Duelists Syrus Truesdale and Aster Phoenix and Chazz Princeton, and a lesser known Duelist named Jaden Yuki. She does occasionally cross paths with them, but never quite becomes a fixture in their social circle because she doesn't feel a need to.

Pawn captures Queen: They're immortal dimension-travelers who leave their marks on the places they stumble into; whether that mark is social upheaval or a leveled city or an abandoned infant mostly depends on, well, they don't quite know themselves... the mood of the weather, maybe?

The game continues with moves made and moves countered and moves coming undone, mostly as the situation demands but occasionally just because they have that option.

Mere moments later, Crystal has been pushed back into a corner; her King is on A8-8, and guarded by two rows of Queens from C6-6 and inwards. A wordless agreements shifts the next battle in the game to 3D space, and what is perhaps the longest of the battles yet waged unfolds.

She simply moves a Queen back and forth, while he assembles four Knight-pieces from out of time. His formation is shot down immediately, because the tricky moves of a Knight is no match for the sheer power of just one Queen, and against more than a dozen, their slim chances of survival becomes less than zero.

Despite that, the slaughter of Knights does result in a Queen being captured, so it isn't a complete loss, Emerald deems the battle. Five more turns pass, and Emerald has readied another assault: Five Rooks in a neat row, seemingly aligned to be fired as if from a cannon.

The match continues, forever. The world outside the game carries on, forever.


End file.
